A blog about gardening in the city. (Oh, who am I kidding? It's about whatever I'm in the mood to babble about for the day - usually my obsessions du jour. Right now those are mostly gardening, bread-baking, and cooking.)

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

64 Square Foot Garden Paradise

So here it is . . .
My 64 square feet of gardening paradise. I just finished planting everything last night then it got very cold. I noticed some frost on the ground this morning on my way in to work. Hopefully all my little plants made it through. They looked okay this morning.
More later about what I planted, but the most interesting things in the garden right now are the peas. They seem to love the cold and are growing so quickly. It seemed like they took forever to sprout. I was worried the seeds had been too disturbed by the squirrels that keep digging in my gardens (more about that in another post, too), but they did finally come up. (I'll have to look back at my garden book to see exactly how long it took.) Now, they're by far the biggest thing in the garden. On Saturday, I rigged up this trellis for them with this cheap plastic fencing I got from Home Depot, some stakes, and some twist ties. I have two of them quite close together, since I have 9-12 pea plants per square foot. I'm worried that it might be hard to reach in there and harvest the peas, but I'll figure that out when the time comes.
I'm so amazed by how the little pea tendrils figure out how to grab onto things nearby. (See in the photo how they already grabbed onto the trellis?) I'm sure there's a scientific explanation, but that just takes all the fun out of it for me. This little guy grabbed on just one day after I put up the trellis. I just think it's so cool. Last year, two of my kids and I were obsessed with watching the morning glories that we planted do the same thing.